Programme

List of talks

Conference venue

Annotation

There has been a steady growth of population in urban centres across the globe. The processes of urbanization have been hastened due to the cities’ rapid technological advancement, broader range of financial and educational opportunities, and better health care services among many other factors. According to the United Nations’ Population Division (UN, 2014), approximately 54% of the world’s population lived in cities in 2014, and it is estimated that this figure will increase to 66% by mid 21st century. One of the consequences of urbanization is linguistic and ethnocultural diversity. A remarkable increase in the number of languages spoken in urban contexts as well as the fact that people belonging to different ethnic, cultural, religious backgrounds come in contact with each other on a regular basis have contributed considerably to the formation of a multilingual and multicultural nature of the 21st century city.
The international conference “Urban Linguistic Diversity” aims to bring scholars working in different fields of linguistics together to discuss topics related to the investigation of language in urban contexts. We invite papers linked to the overarching conference theme with special emphasis on metropolitan cities, including, but not limited to, urban sociolinguistics, geographical linguistics, anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics, multilingual education, multilingual societies/communities, linguistic aspects of migration processes.

Multilingual/global city

Language and migration

Language policy and planning

Language and identity

Language contacts

Linguistic landscape

Language, education and diversity

Heritage language maintenance

Ethnolects

Mixed languages

The conference will be held in English and in Russian. The conference is organized by a research group working on a project “Languages of Moscow” at the Institute of Linguistics RAS, supported by the RFBR research foundation, project #16-04-00474.

Keynote speakers

Dick Smakman (Leiden University), the Netherlands

Vladimir I. Belikov (Lomonosov Moscow State University and Russian State University for the Humanities), Russia

Yaron Matras (University of Manchester), UK

Important dates

January 15, 2018 – Deadline for abstract submission
January 30, 2018 – Notifications of acceptance / non-acceptance
February 15, 2018 – Confirmation of participation
April 9-10, 2018 – Conference at the Institute of Linguistics, RAS, Moscow
May 11, 2018 – Submission of the proceedings of the conference